Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)
lysator.liu.se
lysator.liu.se
Was it just the realities of money, that an end user would rather pay a tiny fraction of the real cost of being truly on line and pay instead with their freedom?
We used to laugh at AOLers because they weren't experiencing the real internet, because they sold themselves out to an online service.
Are today's ISPs with their filtering and port blocking and packet shaping, really any better?
We lost because of the great masses, the eternal october but on a much major scale. The same people that still watch TV and who become numb from their everyday medium to low-wage work, all those who are fighting against each other to climb the ladder just a tiny amount up.
See the original internet users were scientists, officers, business people, those early adopters who have the resources and curiosity to use and shape it it.
Todays internet user is any modern slave whos interests dont stretch out further than facebook and easy entertainment. Most people dont even have a concept of what the internet is. They just kind of randomly click buttons and call their laptops "plaything".
Ive seen people pay for 4G but their modem only by default runs on 3G. Meh.
Did you ever hang out in a computer lab full of people busily attaining a PhD in muds? There were a hell of a lot of people who used the net as a toy, even back in the text-only days.
Money came into the picture. And I'd say we're in worse shape now since even in the AOL days, you would still know that this isn't the real "internet". Now, we've been lulled in the false sense that we're getting unfiltered (un-throttled) access, when in fact, it's just a carefully crafted image.
I look forward to the day "Internet Service Provider" has been completely replaced with "Ubiquitous Wireless Mesh".
You have it completely backwards.
I "discovered" the Internet in 1988 when I got a job in the IT department of the University I attended. I LOVED it. I transferred files, participated a lot in news groups, played MUDs, made friends in Europe... it was wonderful.
When I graduated a few years later, I had to kiss the Internet goodbye. Without attending a major University that poured tons of money into maintaining a connection to the Internet, I had no hope of staying on it. I remember telling my parents about this amazing network of computers and saying something to the effect of, "It's fantastic, but I don't see how most people will ever get to use it because it's so expensive." Afterall, the Internet had been in existence for decades but was completely unavailable to home users.
Then they opened the Internet up for commercial use and the web came along. MONEY CAME INTO THE PICTURE. Tons of it. A few years later, every business felt like it had to be on the Internet in some way. With all that money flowing into web sites and interconnects, access from home became dirt cheap.
Commercialization is what made the Internet available for the masses. It amazes me that here we are not even twenty years later and people are rewriting history, demonizing the very framework that made the Internet successful.
When money came into the picture, small-time ISPs and countless dial-up providers (many who offered some short time free) were popping up everywhere. They were quickly gobbled up or mismanaged to the ground as time went on and what remained was far from the competition (the more equal peers concept) as now only handful of companies control access to the world.
Your university was likely connected via early backbone which would have been sold to a company or is being maintained outside it's jurisdiction and is likely being manipulated purely for exploitation.
Commercialization isn't killing the internet. Monopolization is.
At the end of the day, I look at the way that entrepreneurs like those on HN are able to exploit the Internet. With a laughably small investment in infrastructure and connectivity, a lone developer can spin up the "next big thing" in the cloud.
So sure, the structure of the Internet has changed and in SOME ways it may look like some major consolidation has happened. But in other ways, the diversity of connectivity options has exploded which more than balances out some corporate consolidation in the ISP space.
The Internet of the 90s wasn't as widespread, but it had a much greater impact on areas of life and people it touched.
If anything, your list shows how centralized the Internet has become. After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.
This article talks at how amazing usenet was with it's millions of words a day.
Now any article would take of the valuation of usenet with it's millions of words a day. Someone making a modern usenet wouldn't open their protocol in fear of losing advertising money.
Would twitter, snapchat, etc have their valuations if they released fully open protocols (both client and server)?
Having grown up before the age of the Web/Internet, I couldn't disagree more.
I use Youtube on a regular basis to learn about things. Of the top of my head: gardening methods, worm composting, repairing a cracked ipad screen, fixing a macbook with soda spilled on it, learning about new programming environments.
Facebook and other social media have been given much deserved credit for allowing democratic organization of an unprecedented level in the Middle East.
Wikipedia is astoundingly useful for learning things quickly about math, history, science, culture, etc.
Skype keeps my parents in touch with their grandchildren even better than I kept in touch with my own grandparents when I lived an hour away from them growing up.
You could go on all day describing companies and Internet industries that have completely changed the way people live: Ebay, Salesforce.com, CNN.com, Blizzard, etc.
After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.
The brands are the ones that dominate the services being covered, just like in the old days Xerox was a verb that stood in for the service of making photocopies.
Internet of the 90s created a lot of possibilities that simply didn't exist before. Services of the 2000s mostly centralized and commercialized already existing trends. Of all the brands in your list, I would say Skype is the only one that profoundly changed something.
Also, I still stand by my statement that if the things I named disappeared tomorrow, the world would move on unscathed.
That clause is as true and unprovable for most anything you would put in front of it, depending upon your definition of "unscathed".
That is insane. On the other hand, if you shut down 1993 internet, nobody would have noticed.
> If anything, your list shows how centralized the Internet has become. After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.
That's the natural evolution of every technology - I can imagine you yearning for the day when steam power and electricity wasn't commercialized and was a noble endeavor of hobbyists.
But I'll translate for you: I am talking about wiki software, multimedia streaming technology, social media and search engines, which you conveniently omitted.
Yes, these things are expensive, so they become centralized and commercialized. The world is still better for it.
It's not lost in any real sense, you just have a romanticised picture of "the good old days". Look up the the term BOFH for a reality-check.
A dial-up ISP would be oversubscribed and thus effectively throttled, just like today. Downloading too much on your university account, especially in peak hour, would get you banned.
If you want total freedom, then as now, you are free to buy a dedicated line - and they are much, much cheaper today.
The cost of access to the Internet via 56 kbit/s or 64 kbit/s leased lines varies enormously throughout the OECD area (Table 9). In countries such as Canada and Finland it is possible to get extremely inexpensive access to the Internet via 56 kbit/s and 64 kbit/s leased line connections. In fact, the price quoted for a 56 kbit/s leased line access to the Internet by the Helix Internet, an IAP in British Columbia, was less expensive than a listed 56 kbit/s leased line charge, over two kilometres, from the PTO used in OECD comparisons in the “Communications Outlook” to represent Canada.
The reason Helix can offer a less expensive service is because it purchases capacity from a reseller of BC-Tel’s network in British Columbia. If best practice pricing is defined as the lowest available prices then the suppliers in Canada (US$7 000) and Finland (US$6 000) appear to have set the current benchmarks. This finding is confirmed from within the Internet access industry by EUnet’s Wim Vik who says Finland has the least expensive prices in Europe because of the competitive provision of infrastructure.viii In fact very little separates the prices of these countries when it is considered the Canadian charge includes a router at the customer site. By way of contrast with the low prices found in Finland and Canada, ten OECD countries had a leased line basket price per annum higher than US$10 000, five a basket price higher that US$20 000 and a further three with charges higher than US$30 000. Overall the average price for leased line access to the Internet in countries with telecommunication infrastructure competition was 44 per cent less expensive than countries with monopoly provision of infrastructure.
http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2758588.pdf
Don't forget inflation. In 1995 your $1000 was worth only $652. What was considered "extremely cheap" in 1995 is 10x more expensive than what you seem to imply is prohibitively expensive today. And never mind the speed - your leased line is probably 100mbps, that's 1800x faster than 56kbps.
EDIT: Strictly speaking off-topic, but in the spirit of this thread: I typed "what did a leased line internet conneciton cost in 1995" into Google, it transparently fixed my spelling mistake and gave my this PDF as the first hit. This is truly an awesome time to be alive.
Whining about the "good ole days" when .000001% of the population had even heard of the internet and it was reserved, at great cost, to academics and researchers, is just pathetic.
All controlled by about 5 corporations at the top.
At least we're still allowed to rent servers without a license, and make our own webpages.
Er, Yes! I'd say no one back then would have ever wanted the internet to be as privatized, militarized, and censored as it is now.
We need to take the internet back into the hands of the people by adopting mesh networks. This is how the internet needs to become... and fast :
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/02/24/activists-creatin...
With the rise of cryptocurrencies there is huge potential to make mesh networking catch on around the globe :
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=300911.0
Non-technical users can already easily set up mesh networks using smartphone apps : http://opengarden.com/
Erm. The Internet is an explicitly military invention and without it's (controversial) privatisation, you'd be unlikely to have heard of it. It's not meaningfully censored outside of jurisdictions that already censors all other media extensively (DNS-poisoning consumer lines is bad and broken but really very low on the censorship-scale).
And why is that a good thing in itself? Easy access to anybody else?
Ever stopped to think what kind of other side-effects that ability could have?
Wow, the prediction is a decade off... but 100% correct for those who live in the developed world!
It's funny, because EXACTLY the same could be said right now about cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and Distributed Anonymous Corporations (DACs). The rapid rise of Bitcoin being just the tip of the iceberg.
- Productivity of a single worker: Izya, a mechanical engineering friend, used to spend hours in the engineering library trying to find the right part among hundreds of component catalogs. He now spends about 10 minutes browsing the web, on his smart phone, during lunch, at the local sandwich shop.
- Scale of an enterprise: Wal-Mart, Amazon and all companies of similar scale are effectively IT companies. What they actually sell is simply a side-effect of their IT operations. It is mind boggling to try to imagine the infrastructure and logistics involved in selling $1,300,000,000 worth of consumer goods per day.
- Return on Investment: Even the oil barons would be green with envy at an Instagram, or Twitter or Facebook and the absurdly low amount up front capital paid in to establish these business.
The Internet has changed everything. All of us, from governments to CEOs to grandmothers will spend our lives running to keep up with it.
I mean WOW! Americans were able to get internet at 40$ / month in '93? I recall, in 2003, my folks had to pay huge telephone bills even when my internet usage didn't exceed more than 2 hrs a day (dial-up times).
Then "freeserve" came out[1] and (gasp!) was free apart from the phone call. This was a major shift. There were downsides (only 1 pop3 email account, no newsgroups, no webspace), but it was free!
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_Charles_Herz...
Planning has never seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development of the Internet...
And this one:
Its ease of use will also improve, which is fine news, for the savage UNIX interface of TCP/IP leaves plenty of room for advancements in user-friendliness...
Notice how www/web isn't mentioned? It existed, but even when the first graphical browser came out (that same year), it wasn't clear what the point was - like many, I was on a 2400 Baud modem so every picture or graphic on a page would take 5 - 10 minutes to "come down the wire".
Ah. That changed.
Understatement of the century.
> During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
He was referring to the many initiatives he sponsored and promoted during his time as a U.S. Senator that made the internet as we know it possible. In response to the ridicule that followed the out-of-context quote "I took the initiative in creating the Internet," no less than Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn wrote, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
These days sites like Xvideos, Pornhub etc are monsters when it comes to bandwidth consumption, and there are dozens of major streaming porn sites.
That constant bandwidth demand has been a great catalyst in terms of encouraging ever faster speeds.
How much content is on sites like YouTube or Dailymotion related to sex appeal?
Facebook had intentionally built-in sex appeal aspects to it. It was for college students after all.
Snapchat? Chat roulette? MyFreeCams & Live Jasmin (both of which generate tens of millions in sales)? There are many porn related sites in the top 1,000 global sites. Titillation moves things forward and always will. Humans are sexual beings.
Do you mean the relationship status part? Interesting point.